Data Scientist / Biostatistiker:in / Wissenschaftliche:r Angestellte:r (all genders) - AF-B-STEP

About

We are the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) – and stand for excellent expertise in research, teaching, and comprehensive healthcare in our clinics. Our approximately 15,300 employees strive every day to make the world a little healthier with their contribution.

It is our ambition to be one of the leading university hospitals – and at the same time the best employer in our industry. At UKE, we firmly believe that successful and fulfilling work should be in harmony with the personal needs and individual life plans of our employees. And as diverse as these are, so diverse is our range of individual solutions.

AF-B-STEP

At the University Heart and Vascular Center (UHZ) of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), we think of clinical and translational cardiovascular research as directly integrated into our daily patient care. Our ecosystem comprehensively connects phenotyped cohort studies with 10,000+ participants, including biobanking, structured follow-up examinations, and especially new patient-centered methods, e.g., through networked Smart Health Devices like wearables. We lead and participate in international, guideline-defining clinical studies.

AF-B-STEP is an EU-IHI consortium funded since 2026, coordinated by our center. We are investigating how modern continuous and intermittent monitoring tools can be used to optimize and individualize the diagnosis, risk stratification, and treatment of atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation is the most common cardiac arrhythmia, leads to heart failure and strokes, and more than a third of those over 55 are affected. The results of the consortium will be highly relevant for cardiological guidelines and possibly regulatory decisions by the FDA and EMA. The consortium brings together 18 partners from science, industry, and patient organizations across Europe and Canada and integrates data from over 60 clinical studies and 500,000 patients. More at afburden.org.

Your Role

You will design and operate the consortium's data infrastructure and lead analyses in one of the largest harmonized cardiovascular datasets: AF-BOLD aims to integrate data on atrial fibrillation burden and outcomes from over 60 clinical studies with more than 200,000 patient-years of follow-up. You will design and implement pipelines for harmonization, quality assurance, and AI-based anomaly detection. The data comes from structured datasets, remote patient monitoring platforms, implanted pacemakers and defibrillators, digital EKGs, imaging, time-series data from wearables, and billing data from health insurance companies. You will coordinate the consortium's central data science team, contribute to the supervision of junior scientists, and develop modern strategies for metadata management with semantic enrichment (SNOMED CT, LOINC) and AI-based extraction from clinical documents. You will work directly with scientists at leading academic institutions and industry partners, and participate in publications that may be relevant for both clinical guidelines and regulatory decisions by supervisory authorities. In doing so, you will shape research that will influence treatment decisions worldwide.

This is a fixed-term position for an initial period of three years (third-party funded project). An extension is sought.

Profile/Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Data Science, (Bio)Informatics, (Bio)Statistics, or a closely related quantitative field
• At least two years of professional experience after completing your studies, as evidenced by your CV – part-time jobs during studies and internships do not count
• Technical excellence in Data Science and Data Engineering, demonstrated by a GitHub presence, published papers, or a comparable project portfolio
• Proficiency in PyTorch, as well as practical experience in developing modern microservice and API-based software, and adherence to quality standards
• Experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), object storage (e.g., MinIO), version control including CI/CD with Git and GitLab
• Genuine curiosity for clinical cardiovascular medicine, intrinsic motivation, results-oriented work, and strong self-management skills, which you can explain and justify in your cover letter and interview
• Intrinsic desire to drive the translation of scientific results into patient care
• Excellent communication skills in German and English; ability to communicate between technical and clinical partners and to supervise junior scientists

Desirable

• Experience in analyzing prospective or randomized clinical trial data, ideally in the cardiovascular field
• Experience with data standards for clinical trials (e.g., CDISC SDTM/ADaM) and/or medical ontologies (SNOMED CT, LOINC)
• Demonstrable practical knowledge in the application and development of NLP and/or LLM-based methods for information extraction from medical texts
• Demonstrable practical experience in the administration of Linux-based research infrastructures, Kubernetes for microservice architectures, and workload automation

Please apply with your CV, a cover letter explaining your research interests in the project from both a technical and clinical perspective, reference projects demonstrating your expertise, and a description of your own contribution to these projects, as well as the contact details of preferably three researchers who have agreed to write letters of recommendation.

Immunity Status

Employment is only possible if you provide proof of complete immunization or immunity against the measles virus according to the applicable (legal and medical) regulations. This must be proven by appropriate documents (e.g., vaccination certificate) before starting employment.

Job Offer and Perspectives

• Attractive pay according to TVöD/VKA
• Crisis-proof job, meaningful activity, appreciative interaction
• Structured onboarding and open knowledge exchange within the team
• Extensive training and further education programs at our UKE Academy for Education and Career
• Opportunities to help shape our HR policy "UKE INside" in interdisciplinary and hierarchical projects
• Sustainable travel: Subsidies for the Deutschlandticket as a job ticket and Dr. Bike bicycle service
• Family-friendly work environment: Cooperation for childcare, free holiday care, advice for employees with dependent relatives
• Excellent health, prevention, and sports facilities
• Our employee restaurant offers a wide selection of culinary options; further offerings are available in the "Health Kitchen" cafés and bistros and in a supermarket directly on the premises.